TidBITS#902/29-Oct-07
=====================
Issue link:
With the release of Apple's latest major operating system version,
this week's issue focuses on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, about which
we've also published five Take Control ebooks. Joe Kissell leads off
with a look at the installation process and then climbs into Time
Machine to note what ended up in the final version compared to what
was promised earlier this year. Glenn Fleishman digs into the major
changes in Leopard's file sharing, and shows how screen sharing can
work between Macs running Leopard and those running Tiger. Matt
Neuburg introduces Spaces and explains why Apple's virtual desktop
implementation may be the most important feature of Leopard. As much
as he likes Spaces, Matt also finds numerous frustrations with
Leopard to share. We also note some important early updates, such as
Login and Keychain Update 1.0, an installation problem with
Unsanity's Application Enhancer, a problem with Time Machine and
Aperture, a possible security vulnerability in the Back to My Mac
feature, and a slew of Leopard compatibility updates in iLife and
other components.
Articles
Take Control News: Five Ebooks Launch You into Leopard: Save 30%!
Leopard Early Fixes and Warnings
Evaluating the Leopard Installation Process
Screen Sharing with Leopard Extends to Tiger
Time Machine: The Good, the Bad, and the Missing Features
Leopard Simplifies File Sharing
Six Things I Hate about Leopard
Spaces: A First (and Very Happy) Look
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/29-Oct-07
------------ This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by: --------------
* READERS LIKE YOU! Support TidBITS with a contribution today!
Special thanks this week to David Steffens, Andrew Edsor,
Nello Lucchesi, and Jefferson Ridpath for their generous support!
* FETCH SOFTWORKS: With Fetch 5.2, FTP and SFTP are simpler
than ever. Use it on Mac OS X to upload, download, mirror,
and manage your Web site, eBay images, and data sets.
Download your free trial version!
* WebCrossing Neighbors Creates Private Social Networks
Create a complete social network with your company or group's
own look. Scalable, extensible and extremely customizable.
Take a guided tour today
* MARK/SPACE, INC: The Missing Sync provides the very best in
synchronization for Mac users with BlackBerry, Palm OS, or
Windows Mobile devices. Integrates with Address Book, iCal,
Entourage, iPhoto, and iTunes.
* Microsoft's MacBU: Supporting Mac users with Office 2004.
Supporting the Mac community through tech support newsgroups,
user group appearances, our new team blog, and more!
Check out our team blog at
* VMware Fusion. The most seamless way to run Windows on your Mac.
Buy VMware Fusion today and get $20 off the purchase price.
Rebate offer valid through December 31, 2007.
Visit:
* Seamlessly run Windows on your Mac with VMware Fusion! Run
Windows, Linux, and Solaris simultaneously without rebooting.
Customizable toolbars, easy to manage virtual packages, and more.
VMware Fusion: $69.99!
---------- Help support TidBITS by supporting our sponsors ------------
Take Control News: Five Ebooks Launch You into Leopard: Save 30%!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst
article link:
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is finally here, and we can now share with you
the fruits of an incredible amount of work over the last few months:
five of our most popular ebooks completely updated for Leopard, all
available right now. You can get help upgrading to Leopard,
customizing all of Leopard's new features, sharing files much more
elegantly than in the past, managing your fonts with Leopard's new
font activation capabilities, setting up user accounts, and much
more.
To the thousands of you who pre-ordered our Leopard ebooks, thanks!
You can now click the Check for Updates link (or red starburst) on
your pre-order PDFs to download the full versions. If you haven't
yet ordered, we have three options for you:
1. Buy just the ebooks you want individually. They're all $10,
except for the 217-page "Take Control of Fonts in Leopard," which is
$15. If you've bought the Tiger or Panther versions of any of these
ebooks, click the Check for Updates button in your copy to save 20%.
2. Buy our core "Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard" and "Take
Control of Customizing Leopard" titles for $15, saving 25%. This
bundle is linked on the left side of these books' pages on the Take
Control Web site.
3. Buy our "I Love Leopard" bundle of all five ebooks - over 650
pages in all! - for only $38.50, saving 30% off the cover price.
Again, the bundle is accessible from the left side of each book's
Web page.
You can read more about each of the ebooks on our Web site, but in
short:
* "Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard" is the latest edition of the
title that launched Take Control back in 2003 with Panther. In it,
Joe Kissell shares his hard-won advice about the best ways to
install, test your installation, troubleshoot problems, get going in
Leopard, and more.
* "Take Control of Customizing Leopard" provides a tour of new and
revamped features in Leopard by the ever-opinionated Matt Neuburg.
Matt demystifies Time Machine, shows you how to use Spaces
effectively, and explains why Spotlight in Leopard is so much
improved over Tiger.
* "Take Control of Users & Accounts in Leopard" describes different
types of accounts in Leopard, which ones are right for the different
people who use your Mac, how to share files between accounts, and
what you can limit with new features in Leopard's parental controls.
Kirk McElhearn also explains how to create and use a troubleshooting
account should problems crop up.
* "Take Control of Sharing Files in Leopard" makes file sharing easy
between two Macs, among a mixed-platform office workgroup, or
between far-flung computers on the Internet. Wi-Fi guru Glenn
Fleishman explains each of Leopard's file sharing technologies and
helps you connect to file servers from a variety of major operating
systems.
* "Take Control of Fonts in Leopard" explains everything you need to
know about how fonts work in Mac OS X and what has changed with
Leopard. In particular, veteran Mac author Sharon Zardetto looks at
Leopard's new and updated fonts, along with Leopard's new font
activation capabilities, font previewing via Cover Flow, and font
sample printing.
Leopard Early Fixes and Warnings
--------------------------------
by Jeff Carlson
article link:
Leopard may be the sixth release of Mac OS X, but it's important to
remember that it's also a dot-zero release, the first version of a
major update of the operating system. There are bound to be some
incompatibilities and fixes that Apple is aware of but didn't get a
chance to fix before the discs had to be pressed, or that have
cropped up since hundreds of thousands of people started running it.
Here's a rundown of some current important issues with Leopard.
**Login and Keychain Update 1.0** -- This update resolves an issue
caused by using an account that was created in Mac OS X 10.1 or
earlier, which used a different login authentication method. It also
addresses connecting to some 802.11b/g wireless networks and
changing the password of an account with FileVault enabled. The
update is available via Software Update or as a 10 MB download.
**Application Enhancer and Blue Screen After Installation** -- Many
people who run Unsanity's Application Enhancer utility are ending up
stuck with a blue screen after performing an upgrade installation.
Apple has posted an article with recommendations on how to recover
from the problem (though your best bet is to make sure all of your
utilities are disabled before upgrading as Joe recommends in "Take
Control of Upgrading to Leopard," and that's especially true of
system-level "haxies" like this). Unsanity claims the problem stems
from people using versions of Application Enhancer earlier than
2.0.3, and that they're working on ensuring Leopard compatibility.
(Most third-party developers didn't receive their final release
versions of Leopard until after the retail copies shipped on Friday,
which puts some of the blame for incompatibilities squarely on
Apple's shoulders.)
**Back to My Mac Security Warning** -- Alan Oppenheimer and Open Door
Networks are cautioning Leopard users to turn off the Back to My Mac
feature due to a security vulnerability that enables anyone with
access to your .Mac account password to control your Mac remotely.
Back to My Mac is located in the .Mac preference pane, and is
enabled by default. [Open Door has now posted more details.]
They write: "The problem came in when we selected the server Mac in
the client's sidebar. Instead of either connecting to that Mac's
File Sharing as a guest, or asking us for that Mac's password, Back
to My Mac automatically connected to the server Mac's File Sharing
as that Mac's owner without ever asking for the owner's name and
password. Worse yet, the same thing happened when then clicking on
'Share Screen...' giving us full remote control of the Mac without
ever entering its password."
**Aperture and Time Machine** -- Apple is advising users of its
professional photography software that the Aperture database could
become inconsistent if the program is running during a Time Machine
backup (which occurs every hour). Apple's wording is interesting:
"If you use Time Machine with Leopard, be sure to set your computer
up so that Time Machine only does manual backups." Presumably this
refers to being able to customize the Time Machine backup schedule,
a feature Apple demonstrated but which didn't appear in the released
version. Or, I could be reading it wrong and Apple just means that
you manually switch Time Machine on in the Time Machine preference
pane to trigger a backup.
Speaking of Aperture, Apple has also released Aperture 1.5.6 Update
(a 130.6 MB download), which provides Leopard compatibility and
addresses issues with iPhoto, the iLife Media Browser, and
recovering an Aperture Library from a Vault.
**Stability Updates from Apple** -- Each of the following Apple
software updates provide improved stability and compatibility with
Leopard (and don't mention much else): iLife Support 8.1.1 (6 MB),
iDVD 6.0.4 (6.5 MB), GarageBand 3.0.5 (14.4 MB), and Backup 3.1.2
(6.3 MB).
**FileMaker Pro Has Known Glitches** -- FileMaker Inc. has posted an
article in their knowledge base on FileMaker's compatibility with
Leopard. The company says FileMaker Server 9 and FileMaker Server 9
Advanced don't currently "deploy properly on Leopard," and they're
working on a compatibility update. FileMaker Pro 9 and FileMaker Pro
9 Advanced "generally run on Leopard," with two known issues:
* Instant Web publishing doesn't work
* FileMaker works only if its language version matches the region set
in the Mac's "International Formats Region" preference under System
Preferences. (The English language version, for example, only works
when the Mac is set to the United States region.)
The company says it has not tested versions of FileMaker prior to
FileMaker 9 under Leopard, and has no plans to update earlier
versions.
We'll write more if and when other notable problems arise.
Evaluating the Leopard Installation Process
-------------------------------------------
by Joe Kissell
article link:
Right after Tiger shipped, two and a half years ago, I wrote an
article here about my impressions of the upgrade procedure (see
"Evaluating the Tiger Installation Process," 2005-05-02). I began by
saying that the installer was much better than its predecessor, so
much so that I might not be able to sell as many ebooks about
upgrading as I had when Panther was released! Nevertheless, I found
enough surprises that I could say, with all sincerity, that the
average Mac user is likely to have an easier and more successful
upgrading experience with a bit of expert guidance.
Well, today I'd like to sing another verse of the same song. Yet
again, Apple has made substantial improvements to the installer, and
in general, the Leopard installation is easier and more reliable
than the Tiger installation was. Also, yet again, some aspects of
the upgrade process can cause unexpected problems. Based on the
feedback I've received from readers of "Take Control of Upgrading to
Leopard," the many additional pages of advice and instructions I
added about preparing your Mac to run Leopard - and solving problems
before, during, and after upgrading - have been more than
worthwhile.
**System Requirements** -- Apple always increases the minimum
threshold for hardware compatibility when they release a major
upgrade to Mac OS X. But most people assumed Leopard would run on
any Mac with a G4 or better processor. Not so: if you have a
G4-based Mac, it must be faster than 867 MHz. A question I've heard
numerous times is, "What about my dual-800 MHz Power Mac? Isn't that
faster than 867 MHz?" The answer, as far as the Leopard installer is
concerned, is no. It doesn't matter if your computer is _almost_
fast enough, or if it has multiple processors, each of which is
_almost_ fast enough. If the installer doesn't see an 867 MHz or
faster processor, it won't let you install. I have heard of some
hacks that could let some users of older Macs run Leopard, but I
can't recommend them because Apple won't have tested Leopard on
those machines, so you may encounter other problems, such as video
card incompatibilities and software update failures.
**Installation Methods** -- Apple has made some improvements to the
Archive and Install upgrade method. Specifically, it copies many
more folders and files from your old /Library folder to your new
one, meaning you'll have less work to do afterward to restore
everything to its proper place. The net result is that if you use
Archive and Install, with the Preserve Users and Network Settings
option selected, you'll get virtually the same result as if you use
Erase and Install along with the option of transferring old files
from a backup drive at the end. I still think Erase and Install is
better, because even if the sets of files you end up with are the
same with either method, Erase and Install can wipe out lots of
random disk gremlins, as well as reducing disk fragmentation (for
what that's worth).
Most people, of course (at least those who don't read my book) will
stick with the default Upgrade method. It works reasonably well - in
fact, it seems to be more robust than the same method in Tiger.
However, as ever, it isn't smart enough to disable all of the
innumerable doohickeys you may have installed that could conflict
with Leopard. I've read reports, for example, of old versions of
Unsanity's Application Enhancer causing blue screen hangs after an
Upgrade installation; a variety of other system add-ons, especially
those that hack Mac OS X in ways Apple officially discourages, could
also cause problems. As long as you have a fresh, bootable
duplicate, though, you risk little by trying the Upgrade method -
except the expense of time to redo the installation if it fails.
Speaking of which...
**Make a Backup** -- Do _not_ under any circumstances even consider
thinking about upgrading to Leopard without a complete, recent, and
verified backup of your drive, preferably a bootable duplicate. (Two
backups would be even better.) You should do this not only in case
something goes wrong during the upgrade itself, but so that you can
go back to your previous system, later, if you find out in a few
days or a week that something simply isn't working for you in
Leopard. Even for people who have no trouble with Leopard at all, a
bootable duplicate is extremely helpful in that it lets you use the
Erase and Install method without losing any of your old data or
applications.
**AirPort in the Installer** -- For reasons I can't comprehend, when
you're running the Leopard installer from the DVD, the AirPort
status icon appears in the menu bar. Initially it indicates that
AirPort is off, but you can turn it back on and join a wireless
network right there, in the installer. I can't think of any reason
why you'd want or need to do this, Apple doesn't mention it in their
documentation, and I've read several reports of people having
difficulties with the installation process after attempting to join
a wireless network while booted from the DVD. Why would Apple
include this seemingly useless feature, which can only tempt people
to take an unnecessary action that might actually cause problems?
**Differently Disabled** -- When I wrote about the Tiger installer, I
complained that it didn't automatically disable login items on the
disk you're upgrading, an obvious source of potential conflicts. The
Leopard installer has the same problem, regardless of which upgrade
method you choose. On the other hand, it may in some situations
disable certain software (such as Now Up-to-Date & Contact) without
giving any explanation of why it did that, or what components
specifically were affected.
**Boot Camp Drivers** -- Now that Boot Camp is officially part of Mac
OS X, Apple includes the latest version of their Boot Camp Windows
Drivers on the Leopard DVD itself. So if you're using Boot Camp, you
should reboot in Windows right after installing Leopard, reinsert
your Leopard DVD, and let the installer run to update your Apple
drivers to the latest version.
**You Can Take Control** -- The Leopard installer isn't bad; it's
definitely an improvement over the Tiger installer, and nicer even
than the much-improved installer Microsoft offers for Windows Vista.
Nevertheless - and I'm speaking as someone who has installed Leopard
dozens of times, using many different options, on several machines -
that "just-run-it-and-it-works" experience that Apple wants you to
believe in may or may not be a reality. If you have a relatively
clean system, it could be just that simple. But the more
modifications you've made under Tiger or Panther, the greater your
chances of glitches when upgrading. And, even the most scrupulous
Mac user could fall victim to random disk errors or other unforeseen
problems. So although upgrading to Leopard is not difficult, and is
not something you should fear or avoid - not even in the initial,
10.5.0 release - make sure you do it right. For detailed guidance in
getting your Mac ready for Leopard, performing that crucial full
backup, choosing an upgrade method, and working through problems you
could encounter in the process, read "Take Control of Upgrading to
Leopard," a 125-page ebook that spells out everything you need to
know to make the transition as smooth as possible.
Screen Sharing with Leopard Extends to Tiger
--------------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman
article link:
Screen sharing is the nifty new craze sweeping the nation - but
Leopard users only need apply, right? No! You, too, if you're a
Tiger user, can hop on the electric funk train. (Yes, I'm punchy
following Leopard's release.) All it requires is a checkbox and
maybe an extra piece of free software.
Screen sharing enables remote control of another Mac OS X system
running Leopard. You turn the feature on in System Preferences by
selecting the Sharing preference pane and checking the Screen
Sharing box. (You can choose to limit access to certain users, too.)
You can access a remote screen in one of four ways with Leopard -
and a fifth trick works for Tiger:
* With iChat, any other iChat user running Leopard can share your
screen with your permission (just as though they were initiating
video chat), although you can control that behavior, too. Screen
sharing via iChat can automatically traverse NAT gateways that
handle private addressing for networks created by Wi-Fi and
broadband routers; NAT otherwise stymies access from outside the
local network.
* With the Screen Sharing program, which you can find hidden in the
/System/CoreServices folder (a folder chock-a-block with other nifty
doodads, too). Launch Screen Sharing and then enter the IP address
or domain name for the computer you want to connect to. With this
method, the system you're trying to reach must have a routable IP
address.
* On the local network via the new Sharing section on the Finder's
sidebar. Select any server in the list, and then click Screen
Sharing in the upper right, to the left of Connect As, if file
sharing is also enabled on that same server, or by itself if just
Screen Sharing is turned on.
* With a .Mac account that you use on multiple computers, the Back to
My Mac feature provides access to both network volumes (via File
Sharing) and remote control. (Back to My Mac, in turn, is activated
in the .Mac preference pane in the Back to My Mac tab.) Back to My
Mac, too, can handle NAT traversal.
The fifth approach couples Leopard's Screen Sharing feature with Mac
OS X 10.4 Tiger. It turns out that you can make it possible to
control a Mac running Tiger remotely from a Leopard-based Mac by
turning on the Apple Remote Desktop service in the Sharing
preference pane's Services tab on the Tiger Mac. That enables just
Tiger-from-Leopard control.
For the Leopard-from-Tiger direction, you need a separate, free
application. Screen Sharing is based on, and compatible with, VNC, a
widely used remote-control protocol. You can thus use a VNC client
under Tiger to connect to Leopard systems. First, on the Leopard
Mac, in the Sharing preference pane's Screen Sharing item, click
Computer Settings, and then check the VNC box and enter a password;
note that VNC doesn't rely on or integrate with Mac OS X user
accounts. Back on the Tiger Mac, install the free Chicken of the
VNC, and use it to connect to and control the Leopard Mac. (A VNC
client on Macs running older versions of Mac OS X or computers
running other platforms can also work with Leopard's Screen
Sharing.)
Chicken of the VNC can discover local systems, including those
running Leopard, that are sharing screens by using Bonjour; or you
can enter a remote, routable IP address.
Screen Sharing plus NAT traversal simplifies having remote access to
your own system or systems, as well as providing tech support to
colleagues and your family members.
Time Machine: The Good, the Bad, and the Missing Features
---------------------------------------------------------
by Joe Kissell
article link:
In "Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard," I spent a few pages
talking about how to turn on and configure Time Machine, but I
didn't go into much detail because I already have another book,
"Take Control of Mac OS X Backups," which is all about backups and
is therefore the proper place to put a full explanation of if, when,
why, and how to use Leopard's new built-in backup feature. I am at
this very moment working hard on a new version of that book that
will tell you everything you want to know about Time Machine, and
though I can't project an exact release date yet, we will certainly
make it available as soon as we possibly can.
However, my work on the new book has been slowed down considerably
by having to take time out, on at least a dozen occasions in the
last few days, to answer email messages about what I think of Time
Machine, how well or poorly it accomplishes some task, whether it's
appropriate for enterprise backups or a suitable replacement for
Retrospect, and so on. (The messages usually start, "I know you're
probably going to cover this in an update to your backups book,
but...") I am, of course, always happy to answer messages from
readers, but I never dreamed Time Machine would turn into such a
drain on my productivity! So, in the interest of heading off more
inquiries for a few more days so that I can actually get the book
finished, I'd like to take a moment here to offer my initial
impressions of, and suggestions regarding, Time Machine. For more
information... wait for the book!
**Out of Time** -- First, some bad news. At the Worldwide Developers
Conference in June 2007 - just four months ago - Steve Jobs
announced that Time Machine would work with an AirPort Disk (a USB
hard drive attached to an AirPort Extreme N base station). As
recently as two weeks ago, the same claim appeared on the Time
Machine page on Apple's Web site. But then it mysteriously
disappeared, and sure enough, the shipping version of Leopard offers
no support for AirPort Disks. For whatever reason, presumably
technical difficulties of some sort, Apple dropped that feature at
the last minute. So, while it's still possible to back up multiple
Macs in your home or office over a network, even wirelessly, doing
so requires a host Mac (running Leopard or Leopard Server) - a step
backward in convenience. The same limitation applies to NAS
(network-attached storage) devices from other vendors. Although it
may be possible to work around this problem, I wouldn't trust my
backups to an unsupported hack, and I strongly discourage you from
doing so as well.
That's not the only missing feature. Apple had previously claimed
that Time Machine would support encryption, but it doesn't. It does
keep FileVault archives encrypted, but the cost of doing so is not
being able to back them up until you're logged out of your account -
a significant inconvenience. Yet another missing feature is the
capability to specify a time limit beyond which older files will be
deleted from your backup disk; now Time Machine simply keeps going
until it nearly fills up your disk, and then starts purging older
files - with an optional warning, but without an option to offload
those older files to other media for long-term storage.
Apart from things many of us expected because Apple had told us
about them, Time Machine lacks numerous important features common in
other backup programs. A biggie: it can't make bootable duplicates;
if your hard drive dies, you'll spend long hours restoring your Time
Machine backup to a new drive before you can get back to work. It
doesn't let you schedule times when it won't run, though you can
manually turn it on and off whenever you want. You can't specify
more than one destination disk and switch between them automatically
(as you might want to do, for example, to keep an extra backup
offsite - something I recommend). (It is possible to work around
this in various ways, but I have to do more experimentation before I
can provide reliable advice.) You can't back up to an iDisk or to
optical media. You can't compress your backups - you're going to
need, at a bare minimum, free disk space 1.2 times the size of the
data you want to back up. And although you can manually specify
files, folders, or volumes to be excluded from your backups, Time
Machine offers no intelligent filtering (for example, excluding all
disk images or all downloaded videos).
**Go Forward to Go Back** -- I started with the bad news not to diss
Time Machine or persuade you that you shouldn't use it, but to put
it in perspective. It's the very first version of a brand-new
technology. It has limits and bugs (such as a problem with Aperture
- see "Leopard Early Fixes and Warnings"), and seemingly lost some
features just before its initial release. So despite the one-click
setup (very nice) and the groovy 3-D interface for restoring files
(extra super nice), it is not the Ultimate Mac Backup Program. At
least, not yet.
On the other hand, I can think of at least one excellent reason you
might want to start using Time Machine right now: it's guaranteed to
be compatible with Leopard! Some of your existing backup software
may not be. For example, the developers of SuperDuper are working
hard on a Leopard update, but it's not quite there yet. EMC has
announced that a Leopard compatibility update for Retrospect will be
available within 30 days, and Prosoft says that they're preparing an
update to Data Backup 3. Among the backup software already working
under Leopard is CrashPlan, thanks to an update on 27-Oct-07. A new
version of Carbon Copy Cloner released last week appears to work
with Leopard, but may have a few glitches left. And Apple's own
Backup just had a minor update for Leopard compatibility (among
other things). If you're using any of the dozens of other backup
utilities out there, check with the developer for information on its
support for Leopard.
**Time Machine Impressions** -- I've been using the final version of
Leopard on my main Mac for the past few days, and based on what I've
seen so far, Time Machine appears to work approximately as
advertised. It does back up and restore files correctly when I ask
it to. However, a few things are not quite as I expected:
* Hourly backups, even to a fast external hard drive with a FireWire
800 interface, often take as long as a half hour! So basically, Time
Machine is actively copying files at least half the time. Why does
it take so long? It appears that several factors are involved.
First, I have .Mac Sync turned on, which results in quite a few
files being modified (and therefore, marked as needing backup) every
time it runs, whether manually or on a schedule. Ditto for iDisk
Sync - since I have a local copy of my iDisk, every time I modify a
file there, Time Machine wants to back up that (very large) disk
image again. Also, I have Mail checking six IMAP accounts, and every
time I get new mail, not only the messages themselves but also
Mail's envelope index file and junk mail filter statistics are
updated. A number of other background processes on my machine also
change files fairly frequently. The net result: on my Mac, Time
Machine backs up _tens of thousands_ of files, totaling hundreds of
megabytes, every single hour.
* Disk images are a bit of a problem. If you use Parallels Desktop or
VMware Fusion, you probably have a very large disk image to hold
your Windows installation. Every time you change even a tiny file in
Windows, Time Machine is obliged to back up that entire huge file
again. The same goes for PGPdisk or even an encrypted disk image you
create with Disk Utility to hold confidential files: any small
change marks the entire large file as needing to be backed up again.
This results in a tremendous waste of space on your backup disk, not
to mention a longer time spent performing each backup. Several newer
backup programs, including CrashPlan and QRecall, can back up just
the changed _portion_ of a large file, but Time Machine's approach
makes doing so fundamentally impossible.
* If I activate Time Machine while in Mail, I immediately see dozens
of spam messages in my Inbox that were never there before! Mail's
junk mail filter intercepted them as soon as they arrived and routed
them to my Junk mailbox, but apparently Time Machine doesn't care;
Junk is, in fact, the only mailbox that's dimmed when in Time
Machine's restore mode, so I can't look at how just that one folder
was in the past. I think Apple is trying to be helpful here by
highlighting the fact that a "missing" email message may not be
missing at all but merely mistakenly filed in your Junk mailbox. But
I don't want Time Machine to second-guess me like that.
* Third-party support for Time Machine is still lacking. It's great
that I can restore individual items from Mail, Address Book, iPhoto,
and so on. But I'd like to restore individual keychain items from
1Password, individual snippets from DEVONthink Pro Office or
Yojimbo, and individual records from FileMaker Pro databases. So
far, very few non-Apple applications support Time Machine at the
record level. If and when they do, Time Machine will become vastly
more useful.
Ultimately, I expect I'll continue using Time Machine, but only as
one part of a broader backup strategy. Time Machine is pretty good
at what it does, and may get even better over time. Even in the best
case, though, I'll need some other software to make bootable
duplicates, an additional strategy to deal with offsite backups, and
probably some fiddling to deal with problem areas like disk images
and never-ending hourly backups. And now, if you don't mind, I must
get back to my testing, so that I can explain exactly how to do all
these things in that book I'm writing!
Leopard Simplifies File Sharing
-------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman
article link:
I'm a jaded Mac OS X user. Since 10.2, when Apple made a host of
basic functional improvements over 10.1, I've expected mostly
incremental changes with each new system release. iChat AV and
Spotlight - but, for me, not Dashboard nor Exposť - were notable
marquee exceptions. So it was with a heavy heart that I prepared to
work on "Take Control of Sharing Files in Leopard" with a beta of
Leopard obtained through my membership in the Apple developer
program a few months ago. I expected that Apple would refresh
interfaces and add a few new items, but nothing more.
I was pleasantly surprised. Apple not only consolidated file sharing
options for Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), Samba (or SMB), and FTP
into one place, but they added back folder sharing, a feature never
seen in Mac OS X, even though it was widely used in Mac OS 9 and
releases before that.
Apple's changes allowed me to cut more than 30 pages from the book
while improving its utility: no longer do you need to edit text
configuration files and change obscure settings. It's mostly check a
box, click a button, and choose a value from a pop-up menu. As Steve
Jobs would say, boom.
**Major Streamlining** -- Let me give you a quick overview of what has
changed in file sharing.
* AFP, Samba, and FTP are all controlled from one place. In Tiger and
before, Apple gave its own names to AFP and Samba (Personal File
Sharing and Windows Sharing), and assigned them to three separate
checkboxes in the Sharing preference pane's Services tab. In
Leopard, there is a single File Sharing service in the Sharing
preference pane that consolidates access for all three services.
* Folder sharing. It's a blast from the past! You can take any folder
or mounted drive and share it as though it were a volume. Share like
it's 1999! Or 1997.
* Granular access permissions. The File Sharing service lets you
assign specific read and write permissions for users and groups to
each volume.
* Sharing Only accounts. Apple neatly added a way to create accounts
that are enabled only for sharing, and lack a home directory or
permission to log in via SSH.
* Guest account. There's a guest account that has a separate choice
for allowing password-free server access to specific folders. It has
some limits that I'll discuss later.
* Finder access to sharing. Apple rejiggered how servers appear and
how volumes are mounted in the Finder to make life much better for
average users and power users alike.
Let's look at how this works for setting up file sharing.
**File Sharing Setup** -- With File Sharing selected in the Sharing
preference pane, you might be briefly baffled as to where you go to
turn on any of the three sharing protocols. Click the Options
button, and you'll find a checkbox for each of AFP, Samba, and FTP,
which can be enabled in any combination. Samba access is enabled for
specific accounts due to concerns about its method of storing
passwords being easier to crack than Apple's very strong method.
(This is unrelated to AFP, Samba, and FTP passwords being
transferred over a network; only Samba passwords are encrypted by
default.)
The main File Sharing dialog linked previously shows two lists:
Shared Folders and Users. Any mounted volume or folder that you're
sharing as a network volume appears in the list at left. To add a
folder to that list, either drag it in, or, in the Finder, select a
folder or volume, choose Get Info, and check Shared Folder. You can
also click the + sign below the list and then navigate to and select
folders or volumes.
When you select a shared folder - you can only select one at a time
- the associated access rights show up in the Users list. The Unix
users already assigned to a folder appear, and you can add or remove
users and groups.
For each user or group, you can choose one of three types of access:
Read Only, Read & Write, and Write Only (Drop Box). With the
write-only option, Leopard creates a Drop Box folder in the volume
to which the specified remote user or users with access can copy
files, but whose contents they can't view - it can't be opened. (The
special Everyone user, which encompasses all users including the
Guest account, has an extra status of No Access. It's a way to
disable access without removing the folder from the Shared Folders
list.)
To add users, you click the + sign below the list, and then choose
named users under Mac OS X or people in your Address Book. For
Address Book selections, Leopard prompts you to create a password,
which it uses to then make a Sharing Only user account, if you
haven't already done so.
The File Sharing options all take effect right away - you don't need
to restart anything or click other buttons to make the changes
available immediately. Shared volumes can be accessed by any other
system - with AppleTalk enabled on the appropriate network
interface, you can even discover shared folders from Mac OS 9. (See
the postscript at the end of this article for a discussion on
AppleTalk.)
**Making the Right Kind of Drop Box** -- There's one multi-step
process worth walking through: Creating a drop box. A drop box is a
folder with special permissions that lets a remote user with
write-only privileges drop files into the folder, but not open the
folder to view or copy its contents. (This can be used among users
on the same computer; it is what each user's Public folder's Drop
Box folder is partly for.)
You can set user permissions for a shared folder to be Write Only
(Drop Box), but that makes the entire volume write-only. When a user
mounts that volume, they're told that they can't read the contents,
which could be confusing.
Instead of making the volume a drop box, create a nested folder,
inside which you put the drop box. First, create a folder that will
be the volume; let's call it "Put Files Here". Next, share that
folder by dragging it into File Sharing's Shared Folders list.
Select it in that list, and choose Read Only for all the users who
need access. Don't put any files in that folder.
Now create a new folder called "Drop Box" inside "Put Files Here".
Select "Drop Box" in the Finder, choose File > Get Info, and in the
Sharing & Permissions section, set all the users you want to limit
to Write Only (Drop Box) access. (You may need to click the lock
icon and enter an administrator password to make this change.)
When users mount "Put Files Here" as a volume and open its window in
the Finder, all they'll see in that window is the "Drop Box" folder
with a downward-pointing arrow indicating it can only be written to.
**Finder Tune-up** -- The way that volumes are mounted in the Finder
and appear on the Desktop has hardly changed since we moved from the
Chooser in the classic Mac OS to the often-problematic network
browsing in Mac OS X. Leopard reworks this, partly by combining some
of the aspects of the Chooser with Mac OS X - no kidding!
You can still use Go > Connect to Server in the Finder to type in an
AFP name, an IP address, a domain name, or the name by which Windows
identifies a shared volume, or to pull up a server you've added to
favorites. But the browsing option is what's new and improved in
Leopard.
In any Finder window, you can now see available network servers and
connected servers in the sidebar. You can choose whether servers
visible over the network and connected servers appear in the sidebar
by selecting Finder > Preferences, clicking the Sidebar button, and
unchecking Connected Servers or Bonjour Computers. (The list of
Bonjour Computers includes Windows servers advertised via NetBIOS
servers, too.)
Select a server in the sidebar, and Leopard automatically tries to
connect as Guest using AFP, and shows you the available volumes in
such a case. Click the Connect As button in the upper right of the
window, and you can use a standard server login dialog to enter a
username and password. If you store your login details in the
Keychain, the server automatically logs on the next time you click
it after unmounting.
Networked volumes no longer appear on the Desktop by default unless
you use the Finder's preferences to make them appear. Choose Finder
> Preferences, click General, and check Connected Servers. Otherwise
you will, like me, be scratching your head, wondering where those
volumes went to!
In an extremely welcome change, Apple has added a bit of underlying
magic called AutoFS to eliminate the Finder lockups (complete with
the spinning pizza of death) that we've all grown to loathe when
mounted network volumes become inaccessible for some reason. With
AutoFS, Leopard spawns a separate thread - a separate thought
process, as it were - to handle mounting the volume. You no longer
wait for it to mount, and your system shouldn't lock the Finder if
the volume suddenly becomes unavailable. I have yet to test this
extensively, but AutoFS has worked in this way on other Unix systems
for quite a while.
**Administrators and File Sharing** -- Mac OS X has always had an
issue with the relationship between users who had been granted
administrator privileges in the Accounts preference pane and file
sharing. Until Leopard, if you turned file sharing on, an
administrative user could access all mounted hard drives, and any
folders within those drives that they had permission to access. That
typically included everything but the contents of folders in other
users' home directories.
Leopard doesn't share anything automatically except the Public
folder in each user's home directory, which is typically empty. To
share your startup drive, for instance, you add the drive to the
Sharing Folders list and its default permissions are pre-filled in
the Users list.
Here's where it gets tricky. Three entries appear in the Users list:
System Administrator, which is the Unix root account, set to Read &
Write; Administrators, a group comprising all users on the system
with administrator access, set to Read & Write; and Everyone, a Unix
group comprised of all user accounts on the system, set to Read
Only.
You might think, well, I'd like to remove administrative users'
access, so I'll just select Administrators in the User list and
click the - (minus) button below the list. Wait! You can hear the
spooky music starting as you move toward that button. Removing
Administrators from the Users list doesn't affect just the sharing
permissions attached to the shared volume, but also the underlying
file permissions used for local access.
In my test, my startup volume's icon shifted from a hard disk to a
folder with a red circle icon on it with a horizontal line. If I'd
restarted the machine at that point, I would not like to think about
what might have happened. Adding the Administrators group back in
restored the drive's icon and access.
My advice? Don't share entire drives or partitions unless you're
sure you want all administrator-level users to have access to the
files they would if they were sitting in front of the computer with
direct access.
**What's Missing** -- While Leopard is a big step forward, Apple made
a few choices I hope to see improved upon or at least explained in
future updates:
* The Guest account can't access FTP. For some reason, the Guest
account can access only AFP and Windows servers. This might be a
security feature, but I've not yet found a way to override this
limitation; I'm still looking. (It probably requires a configuration
change, but Apple has changed how it creates configuration files for
services in Leopard, too.)
* Secure FTP (SFTP) isn't integrated with File Sharing (nor has it
been in the past). The encrypted FTP server option requires that you
turn on Remote Access in the Sharing preference pane. SFTP is
technically a component of SSH, a way of securely connecting to
remote systems for command-line sessions. So SFTP honors Mac OS X
accounts, but doesn't honor the shared folders you've set up. Any
Mac OS X user can connect via SFTP to any drive or mounted volume
that they have permission to access, which typically means almost
every one outside of system resources and individual users' home
directory contents. It would be nice to see SFTP more fully
integrated with File Sharing, although Apple is working with
constraints that are designed into SSH.
* AFP login options have disappeared. Most of these options had to do
with secure logins, and my colleagues in the worlds in which secure
AFP was used say that setup was always somewhat wonky. TidBITS
friend Chris Pepper reports that they aren't available in the
Leopard Server administration tool, either.
**More Information** -- If you're looking for more information about
sharing files in Leopard, check out my new book on this topic, "Take
Control of Sharing Files in Leopard." The 89-page book is full of
step-by-step instructions for working with everything mentioned
above, plus a detailed section on sharing iTunes and iPhoto
libraries among users on the same computer or users connecting
across the network. The book starts with a set of sections on how to
figure out what kind of file sharing best fits your needs and the
challenges that face you - along with their appropriate solutions.
**A Postscript about AppleTalk and AFP** -- AppleTalk has a tricky
history relative to AFP. While Apple enabled AFP-over-IP or
AppleShare-over-IP using Internet networking instead of AppleTalk as
the transport mechanism starting with Mac OS 9, it didn't disable
AppleTalk as an option until Tiger. Further, the way that AFP
volumes are advertised on the local network under Mac OS X since
10.2 isn't backwards compatible with earlier system versions. In
brief, and I believe I now have all the nuance in here:
* Mac OS 8 can access Tiger and Leopard AFP-shared volumes and see
those volumes in the Chooser if AppleTalk is enabled on Leopard on
the network interface feeding the network that the Mac OS 8 computer
is connected to, such as an Ethernet network.
* Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.1 to 10.3 can access AFP-shared volumes via
either AppleTalk or AFP-over-IP. (Mac OS X 10.0 doesn't allow
AppleTalk connections, but I can't imagine anyone in their right
mind still running 10.0.)
* Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.0 to 10.1 can't discover AFP volumes that
are shared without AppleTalk on the network they're connected to,
but they can connect by IP address or domain name.
* Mac OS X 10.2 and later can use Rendezvous (10.2, 10.3) and Bonjour
(10.4, 10.5) to discover AFP-shared volumes.
Apple's technical note on the matter has quite a lot of additional
detail that should help people using networks with different
versions of the Mac OS sort it all out.
In short, if you're still using a variety of older versions of Mac
OS on your network, you should enable AppleTalk. Tiger and Leopard
can't connect to an AFP server via AppleTalk, but they can serve it
up for older machines.
To enable AppleTalk in Leopard, open the Network preferences pane,
select the interface - like Ethernet - and choose the AppleTalk tab.
Check the Make AppleTalk Active box. You can have AppleTalk active
on only a single interface at a time under the regular version of
Leopard; the server version lets you activate AppleTalk on multiple
interfaces.
Six Things I Hate about Leopard
-------------------------------
by Matt Neuburg
article link:
Let's all do the Leopard Moan. Yes, Time Machine is cool, Spaces is
neat, but oh (moan!), the interface! What were these people
_thinking_? Yes, you've got a rant inside you, waiting to howl to
the moon, and so do I; it's a full moon right now, so let's take
this opportunity to get it out of our systems (pun intended).
Herewith, then, some things I just can't stand about Leopard.
**The Dock** -- The Dock now expresses itself as a silly reflective
shelf. My objection to this is not merely the business of "wasting
CPU cycles drawing trendy 3D junk." In order to accommodate the
reflection, the Dock icons have to sit considerably higher than
before, robbing the user of valuable screen real estate. Even worse,
the indicators of an icon's status, in particular the marker that
tells you that an application in the Dock is currently running, are
darned near invisible, lost in the reflective shelf's shiny
suckitude. Luckily, at the last minute, after the last seed but
before the Golden Master, Apple relented and provided an alternative
mode of Dock display; this alternative is now the default if you
move the Dock to the left or right side of the screen, and can be
applied even to a Dock at the bottom of the screen by using some
Terminal trickery. In short, issue these two commands in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock
**The Grey** -- Remember when your Mac had a 9-inch screen and every
pixel was either black or white? It looks like Apple does, too, with
nostalgia. This system declares war on color. The result is just
plain ugly. That's right, folks, you heard it here: the "unified
textured look" of windows in Leopard, for which iTunes was evidently
the incubation laboratory all along, is ugly. The title bar of a
window is big and grey. The title bar of a window that isn't
frontmost is a _lighter_ grey, which is backwards: surely it's the
_frontmost_ window which should light up, not all the background
windows? In the Finder, they've also slapped a grey background
behind the sidebar; since the text and icons in the sidebar are also
now tiny (with no preference to make them any larger), they are both
ugly and illegible. An empty folder icon is no longer a lovely
shaded three-dimensional-looking blue filing folder; it's a flat
grey rectangle. Plus, standard folder icons, as for the
Applications, Library, Users, and other built-in folders, are now
uniformly blue-grey as well; there does seem to be some kind of icon
drawn on each of these folders, but it's tiny and in another grey,
so it's virtually invisible. I had no idea how much I relied on the
subliminal cues of the large, colorful icons on these folders, until
they vanished and I found myself lost in a uniform Finder.
**The Menu Bar** -- The menu bar is now somewhat transparent. So if
your desktop picture is purple, the menu bar is also slightly
purple. If your desktop picture has stripes or bright dots, the menu
bar has stripes or bright dots. Menus that drop down from the menu
bar are also somewhat transparent; they were before, too, but the
native stripes that used to mask that fact are gone, so they inherit
the problem. The result is that the menu bar, along with the menus
themselves, is less prominent, harder to read, and has a somewhat
unready or disabled look, entirely inappropriate to its function.
**The Stacks** -- Let's pause to remember how a folder in the Dock
used to work, as we kiss it goodbye forever. In Tiger, the story is
like this. You have a folder in the Dock. It looks like a folder.
Click it and it opens in the Finder. Command-click it and you view
it (in its containing folder) in the Finder. Control-click it and
you get a hierarchical menu of its contents, the contents of its
folders, and so on. Just about all of that is now gone. Gone! What
was wrong with it? Nothing! It was great. But now, a folder in the
Dock, if it has any files in it, doesn't look like a folder; it
looks like a file (in particular, it takes on the preview of one of
the files it contains). The hierarchical menu of the folder's
contents is completely missing. Worst of all, clicking on the folder
icon doesn't open the folder; instead, it pops up a lot of icons
representing the contents of folder. That's okay, I guess, if any of
those preview icons represents a document that you wanted to open,
and if you can tell that from the preview icon; in that case, just
click it. But I can't usually tell anything from preview icons, and
anyhow, the main thing I want to do with a folder is usually not to
open a document within it. What I want is a Finder window listing
the folder's contents, so I can study that list, or sort it, or
navigate further into the hierarchy, or whatever. In Leopard,
arriving at such a Finder window is now a two-step process: first
click the folder icon in the Dock; then find and click the "Show in
Finder" button. Or, hold the mouse button down on the folder icon in
the Dock to make the menu appear; then click the Open menu item.
Yeeesh! Talk about making something hard that should have been easy.
**The Help** -- When you choose something from the Help menu in any
application, what opens is no longer the Help Viewer application.
It's an orphan window that floats over, and blocks your view of,
everything else on the screen. It belongs to no application, so you
can't hide it or switch away from it. Now, what's the most common
thing to do while you're reading an application's help
documentation? You read something in the Help, you switch to the
application to try it; you see something in the application, you
switch back to the Help to learn about it. No more. Now, as soon as
the help window opens, you're stuck: you're in the help window and
that's the only place you can be, until you close the window (or
minimize it into the Dock). I suppose this is no problem at all if
you have massive tracts of screen real estate, as in Al Gore's
triple Cinema Display setup; but for most of us, it's horrible. This
is going to be a disaster for professional authors of online help,
such as, uh, me, because it makes our carefully written
documentation effectively unusable. I've already started to make
plans for writing my own alternative help application that will act
like an ordinary application. The irony is that it took from Mac OS
X 10.0 right through to 10.3 (Panther) before Help Viewer even
started to become a pretty good application; now Apple has thrown
all of that progress right out the window. The floating window, that
is.
**The Classic** -- Apple might not like to condone or even to believe
this fact, but there is a large installed user base out there
consisting of people who, every now and then, have to run a Mac OS 9
application. Some of us have data in a Classic format, such as a
HyperCard stack, and now and then we like to peek at that data. Some
of us even make a living out of running a Classic application, as I
do with FrameMaker. (It's still the best way on earth to create
first-rate PDFs, or large structured documents; it's also an
absolutely brilliant XML editor.) I was able to accept, when I
acquired my first Intel-based Mac a few months ago, that it wasn't
going to run Classic; I can well believe that there might be
something about an Intel processor that inherently makes Classic
emulation prohibitively difficult. But there is nothing about a new
system version, running on a PowerPC-based Mac, that blocks Classic
from running; Apple's decision not to support it in Leopard is
arbitrary (and feels not a little spiteful).
There, I've done my screaming. The Great Moan is over. I had to do
it, just this once. I've said what I had to say, and now I won't
have to mention any of these things again. And maybe, just maybe,
Apple will see fit to address some of these complaints in a
forthcoming update to Leopard. I'm not holding my breath, but you
never know.
Spaces: A First (and Very Happy) Look
-------------------------------------
by Matt Neuburg
article link:
When Apple posted its list of 300 features that are new in Leopard,
your eyes may have glazed over. Many of these new features won't
mean anything to you until you've tried them, and, in Apple's list,
you can't readily distinguish something small and cute from
something massive and profound. (Let's face it, the "Arabesque
Screen Saver," while pleasant, is hardly on a par with being able to
"Back Up Everything" with Time Machine.) Furthermore, some new
features are just hard to describe in a sentence or two, so a proper
sense of their implications doesn't come across to the reader. In my
view, Spaces is one of those features: It's massive and profound,
but Apple's own explanation fails to do it justice. If someone asks
you, "Why upgrade to Leopard?" the three little words, "To get
Spaces," could be a sufficient reply. For sheer productivity
potential, making your computer easier and slicker to work with,
Spaces may be the single most important benefit of upgrading to
Leopard. In this article, I'll try to help you see why.
So... what is Spaces?
Well, it's a "virtual desktop" implementation. Now, all you Unix X
Window virtual desktop users can stop reading right here, or at
least skip the next few paragraphs. Those of you who have tried
VirtueDesktops (abandoned early in 2007) or the commercial CodeTek
VirtualDesktop also have a sense of what Spaces is about (though
these, to be clear, were effectively hacks; the only clean way to
implement a virtual desktop feature is to integrate it at system
level into the windowing system, as Apple has now done with Spaces).
Right now, I want to talk mostly to the virtual desktop newbies who
haven't a clue. You others, stick your fingers in your ears and go
"La la la," okay?
Okay, clueless newbies - we're all alone together. Come closer.
Closer! Good. Here's the deal.
Spaces is all about straightening out the clutter of windows on your
screen. What is the biggest problem with windows? It's that there
are always too many of them, and most of them are covered by other
windows. Thanks to Mac OS X's great memory management, you can run
lots of applications at once, and you can have lots of windows open
at once; but, no matter how big your screen is, you usually can't
actually _see_ all of more than one or (at most) two windows at the
same time. Everything else is just a big overlapping mess. And on
Mac OS X, as opposed to earlier Macintosh systems, it's even more of
a big overlapping mess because the windows of different applications
can end up all intertwingled with one another.
The result is that when you're trying to get anything done that
involves working in more than one window at once, things get
difficult. There's a window in front, and then there's everything
else, little corners and title bars sticking out here and there,
like the aftermath of a wild game of Fifty-Two Pickup. Where is the
precise other window you need to be able to see at this moment? You
have no clue.
Notice, please, that I keep talking about windows - not
applications. When you come down to the nitty-gritty, getting
complex stuff done on your computer is not really about
applications; it's about particular windows. Those windows might
come from any applications: they could be different windows of the
same application, or windows from various different applications.
That's why the simple tools available to you for switching between
applications are never quite enough. For example, you can simplify
the display on your screen by choosing Hide Others from the
frontmost application's menu. Now only the windows of this
application are showing. But perhaps you really want to see just
_one_ of this application's many windows, plus one window from some
_other_ application. So first you might scurry around minimizing the
windows from this application that you don't want to see. Then you
have to switch to the other application, making it visible, and find
its desired window and bring it to the front and position it. Then
you have to switch back to the first application. Now you can work
in both windows. Great, but what happens when you suddenly need a
different window from the first application? You have to hunt for it
in the Dock, and when you expand it, there it is, blocking
everything and complicating the picture. Or perhaps you need a
window from a third application: you bring that application to the
front, and presto, _all_ of that application's windows are plastered
all over the screen, blocking everything and complicating the
picture. Is it any wonder tabs have become so popular?
Spaces is all about this problem. It lets you work with _sets of
windows_. That's all a space is - a particular set of windows. When
you are "in" this space, just this set of windows is visible. When
you switch so that you are "in" a different space, a different set
of windows is visible. In the previous paragraph, I was trying to
make two points: (1) it's hard to arrange things to see just the
small set of windows you need for Task A, and then, (2) when you
want to perform Task B, bringing different windows into play
complicates the whole picture. With Spaces, Space A could consist of
just the windows you need for Task A, and Space B could consist of
just the windows you need for Task B. You can then switch between
spaces, meaning visible window sets, and everything stays simple:
you are always seeing all and only the windows you want to see.
So the main thing Spaces is about is _switching_ spaces. In fact,
you can turn Spaces on and _never_ switch spaces, and then you won't
even know or care that Spaces is on! You'll be living in exactly the
same world you always lived in. In fact - oh my gosh! We'd better
actually turn Spaces on, or all the rest of this discussion is going
to be pointless! So, do this:
Choose Apple Menu > System Preferences. Click Exposť & Spaces. Click
Spaces. Check "Enable Spaces." Whew! Now Spaces is on.
So _how_ do you switch spaces? There are four (count 'em, four)
ways:
* All Spaces mode. This is what you get when you press F8, or click
the Spaces icon in the Dock. (If you don't see the Spaces icon in
the Dock, drag it in from the Applications folder.) It behaves a
little like Exposť, in that it provides a reduced, schematic version
of the world: all your spaces are shown at once, in a grid, and now
you can click one to switch to that space. This is nice because you
can sort of see what windows are in each space. Plus, if you want to
get really cool, while you're in All Spaces mode you can press F9 to
enter Exposť's All Windows mode, and now _each_ individual space
shows _each_ of its individual windows (which are getting pretty
tiny at this point) and you can click a window to pick a space and a
particular window all at once! (Note: I'm saying "F8" and "F9", but
those might not be your actual shortcuts for these actions, because
they are customizable.)
* Use the Spaces menu. If you don't see the Spaces menu, check "Show
Spaces in menu bar" in the Spaces preference pane in System
Preferences. It displays nothing but numbers: the numbers of your
spaces (1, 2, and so on). Choose one to switch to that space.
* Use a number. By default, the number shortcuts for switching between
spaces involve the Control key. So, press Control-1. Now press
Control-2. Congratulations, you just switched spaces.
* Use an arrow key. This is trickier, because it relies on a concept I
haven't introduced yet. You see, your spaces are imagined as lying
in a grid. You can see this imaginary grid in the Spaces preference
pane where we just were a little while ago. By default, there are
four spaces, and the grid is a 2-by-2 rectangle. (This grid is
customizable - you can change how many spaces you have and how the
grid is arranged - but for this example I'm pretending you haven't
yet departed from the default.) So if you are in space 1, you can
switch to space 2 by pressing Control-Right arrow, because space 2
is imagined as being to the right of space 1; but, again, if you are
in space 1, you can switch to space 3 by pressing Control-Down
arrow, because space 3 is imagined as being below space 1. Feeling a
bit seasick? Maybe it would better not to use this way of switching
between spaces until you are a certified expert (or just plain
certified).
There is one more elementary concept connected with Spaces that we
need to get clear on: How does a window come to be in a particular
space to start with? Well, there are two ways:
* You created the window while you were in that space. For example,
you are in space 2, and you start up TextEdit. TextEdit wasn't
running before, and when it launches it creates a new window. So you
are in space 2 and you are creating a new window, and therefore that
new window will be in space 2. Of course there are many other ways
to create a new window in various applications.
* You moved the window from one space to another. Huh? Since you can
only be in one space at a time, how can you possibly do _that_?
Well, if you're in All Spaces mode, you can actually drag a
miniaturized window directly from one space to another. Or, while
you are in one space, hold the mouse down on a window's title bar
and switch directly to another space with a keyboard shortcut; the
window will travel with you to the new space. Or, drag the window to
the edge of the screen and pause with the mouse still down and at
the screen's edge; you'll switch spaces automatically, bringing the
window with you. Keen, eh?
That's all there is to know about elementary use of Spaces. I'm not
going to talk about "application bindings" right now; it's too
advanced for this discussion (you can learn more about that by
experimentation, or you can check out my new ebook, "Take Control of
Customizing Leopard," for more info). But there is just one point
that I want to leave you with as you start experimenting with
Spaces, and it's this: Spaces is complicated but simple. It's
complicated because there are lots of different scenarios, but it's
simple because Spaces always does "the right thing."
For example, let's say you've opened TextEdit in space 2, and that's
the only place where any TextEdit windows are. And let's say you're
now in space 1. And let's say you use the Dock, or Command-Tab, to
switch to TextEdit. _What will happen???_ Well, what's the right
thing? TextEdit's windows are all in space 2, so the only sensible
thing is that you should automatically be switched into space 2 so
you can see them. And sure enough, that's exactly what does happen.
I could go on and on positing various scenarios of greater and
greater complexity, but that's pointless; all you need to know is
that Spaces will behave sensibly and simply, and that you'll catch
on to its logic almost immediately with a little experimentation.
So, congratulations: You are no longer a clueless newbie. You're a
clued-in newbie! With a little practice, you will soon find ways to
use Spaces that will make your computer life simpler and easier. I
can't tell you what they are because I don't know what kind of thing
you do. Perhaps you'll usually have a space for all your Internet
apps and another space for all your writing apps. Perhaps you'll
have spaces for certain particular tasks that you typically perform.
It's all up to you. I do have one piece of advice, though: Try it,
you'll like it! Whether you've got a big multi-monitor setup or a
tiny portable screen, Spaces has the potential to make your life a
lot easier. You simply have to remember to use it. With a little
practice, you will.
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/29-Oct-07
------------------------------------
by Jeff Carlson
article link:
**Radio on the iPod touch** -- Will Apple's iPod Radio Remote work
with the iPod touch? Apparently not. What other solutions exist for
listening to the radio? (14 messages)
**Apple Board Member Al Gore Awarded Nobel Peace Prize** -- Our news
item about the former U.S. vice president elicits complaints that
TidBITS is being political; does merely mentioning Gore's name imply
something, or was it straightforward reporting? (14 messages)
**Apple Education Discount** -- When people abuse the education
discount (a man got a student to buy Leopard for him at a steep
discount), does it jeopardize the program for legitimate users? (2
messages)
**It's Official: Leopard DELIVERS on October 26th, 2007** -- Initial
shipping reports sounded as if Amazon.com was going to deliver
Leopard on its opening day, but for some people that didn't pan out.
Readers also share their impressions from the Leopard launch at
Apple retail stores. (16 messages)
**How Leopard Will Improve Your Security** -- Rich Mogull's article on
the changes in Leopard security raises other questions, such as how
to secure your data when using Time Machine. (15 messages)
**Are Your Fonts Ready for Leopard?** Our article on preparing fonts
for Leopard brings up questions of how to extract Font-DA Mover from
its outdated self-extracting archive wrapper. (6 messages)
**iPhone battery indicator** -- The iPhone battery indicator changes
colors depending on which screen you're on, a change that appears to
have arrived in the iPhone 1.1.1 update. (2 messages)
**Talking Your Way Out of a Plastic Bag** -- The next time you're in
the middle of the wheat harvest, a plastic bag over the iPhone will
help. "Be prepared to farm" is our motto. (2 messages)
**Speaker system for iPod** -- Which of the current crop of iPod
speakers are recommended? (5 messages)
**GMail and IMAP** -- Google is rolling out IMAP access to its Gmail
service, and readers share their experiences and workarounds. (14
messages)
**Wait for 10.5.1?** With every new major operating system update, the
question becomes: jump right in, or wait for the first big bug fix
release? (4 messages)
**MacLive Expo London** -- Apple doesn't appear to be exhibiting at
this event, and there are questions about the future of a Macworld
conference in London. (2 messages)
**ALS and the Mac** -- What resources are available for someone with
ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or other disabilities to use the
Mac? (3 messages)
**Leopard Install Issues** -- Readers share their experiences (and
frustrations) with upgrading to Leopard. (7 messages)
**Can you finally share the Shared folder?** Sharing is greatly
improved in Leopard, but what's the line between convenience and
security? (5 messages)
**Looking for PDA suggestion** -- A reader who has been using a Palm
Tungsten E2 is looking to move to a smartphone. Which models are
worth investigating, and which features are important when
considering them? (4 messages)
**Help Viewer Window doesn't inhibit other Programs** -- A reader
takes issue with Matt Neuburg's complaint that the floating Help
window gets in the way. (2 messages)
**Leopard: iCal issues** -- The new iCal gives one reader trouble with
shared calendars, but the problem might be local. (2 messages)
**Booting separate computers from one drive** -- Is it possible to
boot two Macs, one Intel and one PowerPC, from the same external
drive? (1 message)
$$
This is TidBITS, a free weekly technology newsletter providing timely
news, insightful analysis, and in-depth reviews to the Macintosh and
Internet communities. Feel free to forward to friends; better still,
please ask them to subscribe!
Non-profit, non-commercial publications and Web sites may reprint or
link to articles if full credit is given. Others please contact us. We
do not guarantee accuracy of articles. Caveat lector. Publication,
product, and company names may be registered trademarks of their
companies. TidBITS ISSN 1090-7017.
Copyright 2007 TidBITS: Reuse governed by Creative Commons license.
Contact us at:
TidBITS Web site:
License terms:
Full text search:
Subscriptions:
Account help: